Month: April 2017

As was the capricious, romantic and, in some cases, downright fictitious nature of news reporting in the United States during his rise to prominence, myth and mystery surrounds pretty much everything Babe Ruth ever did.
His Called Shot during the 1932 World Series, for instance, is still shrouded in uncertainty, just like the fable that he once hit a Fall Classic home run to fulfil the last wishes of a sick kid in New Jersey. There’s no way to tell for sure whether these wondrous feats actually occurred, thanks in large part to the cliquey journalism culture of the age.
In those days, beat writers were paid by the team they covered and, frequently, they travelled on the same trains, slept in the same hotels, and drank in the same bars as the players, managers and executives. Thus, whether by design or osmosis, the work of said writers was typically drenched in hyperbole and fabrication, especially when it came to the eminence...